I’m at the bench at 4:30.
That’s the thing I didn’t expect.
Twenty years of four-thirties for a man who called it carrying, and it turns out I don’t hate the hour.
I hate who I was doing it for.
Rosalie says my mother was the same.
“She’d say, ‘Rosalie, the ovens don’t care whose name is on the awning.
They just want to be lit by someone who means it.'”
So I light them.
Every morning.
In a building my mother bought one loaf at a time, with the loaves still in the walls, and a lease clause she wrote about a man she’d met once and understood completely.
And last week, a girl came in.
Nineteen.
An apron from a chain place, a job application, and a look I knew.
“I heard you need a baker.”
“I need someone who’ll be here at four-thirty.”
“I can do four-thirty.”
